


Panoramic

by phantasmist



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Batman: The Telltale Series (Video Game)
Genre: Fluff, Friendship/Love, Gen, M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-31
Updated: 2018-03-31
Packaged: 2019-04-16 00:49:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14153058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phantasmist/pseuds/phantasmist
Summary: Bruce visits John in Arkham—and John visits Bruce at the manor house.





	Panoramic

**Author's Note:**

> Contains spoilers for an ending of Batman: The Enemy Within.

When Bruce tells John, see—it's like he said, he wouldn't abandon him, John squeezes his eyes tight shut a moment. A twitching, flinching frown. And he turns his face away from the window between them. It is a bullet resistant window. Thick, a glass-clad polycarbonate. With a voice-transmission system cut low at its center, and gap of space between its bottom edge and the slick top of the booth between them. A recent upgrade, to the visiting rooms at Arkham Asylum. If Bruce comes in the daytime, during official hours, this is where the two of them are brought together. 

"Did you say that?" John asks, doubtful. "About not abandoning me?"

Bruce is surprised. "Yes."

John closes his hands into fists. So tight they tremble, and the knuckles stand out rough and bony. He lays them flat on his half of the table. Looks at them. Flips them over, upward. The scar on the back of the right hand is also on the palm. The batarang went straight through, one side to the other. And the mark is healing unevenly. He is messing too much with the stitches. Ripping them out over and over, so that the asylum doctors must keep putting them back in.

"You know," John says. "Sometimes I have trouble remembering how it all went. It's like it was just a little different than it really was. Not _much_. Just... just a little, little, tiny bit. The things you said. The things I said. I'm not sure."

"Sounds confusing."

"Oh, yes. Ohh, _yes_." John nods, and grins ugly and rabid, and his gaze flashes back up to meet Bruce's. "But the end, the important part. That's clear. So it's okay, it's all okay."

—————

Bruce bribes the night staff and visits the asylum in its howling darkest hours. He sits in John's room in the single chair, and John sits on his bed with his back against the wall, and they play cards on the rumpled edge of the mattress.

It has to be cards. John has a baffling respect for—and encyclopedic knowledge of—the rules of card games. Anything else, he cheats at. Or changes the mechanics of. Chess was a disaster. Halfway through he started making the pieces all do voices in odd accents, and some developed convoluted backstories and dark motivations. They betrayed each other. Acted as double agents. Had scandalous pawn-and-bishop love affairs. Bruce had mistakenly thought, after that, that maybe it was just that John could only handle much simpler board games—but Candy Land was a hundred times worse, and Monopoly had taken a nightmarish turn right around Northumberland Avenue. So now, they stick to cards.

"I'm sorry," John says, "about your butler Albert."

"Thank you." Bruce doesn't correct the name. He suspects John got it wrong on purpose.

"Is it lonely, in that gigantic rich boy mansion? Do you wander around talking to yourself? I would. I'd never wear pants there, either. If it was just me. And I'd ride rolling chairs down the hallways and staircases. And eat poptarts and ice cream for every meal. You know. All the stuff a stern British butler-daddy would never let me get away with."

"I haven't been home much, lately."

"You know what," John says, and claps his hands over his mouth and then together in front of him, excited. "When I get out of here, we should have a slumber party!"

Bruce winces. "I don't think they're planning on discharging you again any time soon."

"Discharging me?" John asks, and cackles.

That only worries Bruce a little bit. Not as much as it should. He lays his cards down between them, two pair. John takes a deep breath and rolls his sleeves up past his elbows. He shows the five cards in his hand, flips his hand back, then around—and the cards have vanished. He wiggles his fingers. Pretends to pluck the cards back out of thin air. The ten of hearts, the jack, the queen, the king. He leans forward and pulls the ace from behind Bruce's ear. And he is good, very good, at card tricks. It even feels real, that little bit of magic. How there is nothing, and then the smooth quick brush of his friend's fingertips, and the flick of crisp playing card paper. And there it is. John lays a royal flush out between them.

"I win!" he cries. "I beat you both!"

Because sitting between them, with a third hand of cards dealt out to him, is a little business man plushie. Bruce finds the thing unsettling. It's clearly supposed to be _him_ , and it's wearing a lot of lipstick. Asked where he got makeup to put on his button-eyed Wayne copy, John only shrugged and replied—oh, there's plenty of stuff in his room that he isn't supposed to have. 

—————

Here is how it starts. Bruce opens his eyes to bleary afternoon sunlight, and he realizes there is something in bed beside him. It's small and dark. It has button eyes, and a lot of lipstick on. It's resting under the cover, with its head on the pillow next to his.

"The door was unlocked, we let ourselves in."

There is also someone in bed behind him. And Bruce's first flash of instinct is to strike hard with an elbow. Then he realizes—wait, it's John, and stops himself. Then he realizes—wait, it's John, and thinks maybe the elbow is a good idea after all.

In the second of confusion, the hesitation because this is his best friend but also an extremely dangerous criminal psychopath, Bruce starts to ask "What the h—" and John pushes a whipped cream pie into his face.

—————

At the kitchen island downstairs, Bruce drinks coffee in his bathrobe while John, in white hospital clothes and slippers that are issued to all Arkham inmates, sits across from him and eats what's left of the pie.

He might just have easily have slit his throat, Bruce thinks. And broods silently over the fact, and takes another sip, while John dashes colored sprinkles over his meal, the way a normal person might add salt or pepper to something. Bruce doesn't know where those came from. Either John brought them with him, or he discovered them in one of the cabinets. The kitchen was very much Alfred's domain. Since he left it has remained untouched, precious, the scope and organization of the dinnerware and pantry items utterly intimidating. There might very well have been sprinkles to be discovered somewhere or other, here in the manor house. Bruce has no idea.

—————

John continues to refer to it as a slumber party, and that doesn't get any less embarrassing to hear. Bruce isn't sure what it really is, but it's not that. A visit? It goes on for one day, and then another. He doesn't take John back to Arkham, and John doesn't blow his house up or murder his gardener or try to stab him with anything. He throws a red bowtie in with the white laundry, and a few shirts Bruce liked come out pink and ruined, but that's the worst of it.

Mostly, John explores and chatters and makes messes of things. And it's unnerving. And Bruce is angry at himself, more than anything, for allowing this. For taking the risk of it all. Why? It's a relief not to be alone in the house, he thinks. And that's ridiculous. He is chancing death. More than that. There is always the possibility that John might give him the slip, head into the city, go on another mad spree and cause the death of who knows how many innocent others. It would be Bruce's fault, if that happened. For not just taking this maniac right back to the padded cell he belongs in.

But he doesn't do it, and doesn't do it. And each morning when he returns and takes off the suit, John is there waiting for him.

There is a thing about John. It isn't a good thing, really. Bruce has never understood another person so well, and he has never felt so deeply understood himself. Not even by Alfred. Because Alfred loves him, but it is a love weighed heavily by expectation. And disappointment. Alfred cared deeply for the boy Bruce once was—and the man he hoped to see him become. What of the person Bruce actually _is?_ The selfhood that exists in the moment, that continually changes. That is all the duty, the mercy, the courage; but also the dark, the pain, the brutality—all at once? Because Bruce is that. A lot of bad and a lot of good, no one part separate from any other. Woven strands that make a whole.

How rare, how unlikely that any single person could ever look at you and see that complex wholeness. The truth, the soul. In all its parts, its vast fractured proportions. Like Gotham spread out. The smoggy jagged wreck of it, the glittering soaring grandeur. All one. How rare all over again that the kind of person who could achieve a panoramic view of such a soul might say to themselves— _how perfect! How right! How much I love it. I am home, at last._

—————

John shrieks with laughter from the TV room. Bruce follows the noise and the blue flickering television light and finds the other man rocking on the leather sofa in front of the wall screen.

"This again?" Bruce asks. Because this is day five of John's invasion, and it's the second time Bruce has arrived home in the early morning hours to find him marathoning old black and white comedies. Harold Loyd, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy. That kind of thing. He's in the middle of a Marx Brothers film. The jokes make him laugh disturbingly, loud and gasping and flailing with delight, each time he hears them. The humor doesn't seem to wear thin, though he knows these movies by heart, and will sit through parts of them murmuring all the words along with the actors, waiting tensely to fly into hysterical joy again at each punch line.

"Sit, sit, sit, sit!" John says, scooting over and patting the cushion beside him. "It's getting to the good part, the best part. Shh, sshh, no quiet. It's the mirror bit, it's coming up."

Their eyes meet in the flashing dark, as Bruce sits. Still in his body armor, still in his cape. Bruce feels about John the way he feels about Gotham. It's selfish, to allow the vileness of either—to try and control, and limit that vileness—because he so cherishes the startling, strange, beautiful parts. In his city, and his friend. But what is vile and what is beautiful cannot be separated here. They are both only one thing, Bruce knows, to be protected.


End file.
